I blog therefor I ham

I decided to break the great pizza drought of 2006 the other night by whipping up 5 home made pizzas - enough to stuff to bursting all the family members on this side of the continent. The ratio was 4 adult pizzas to 1 kids pizza, and I needed ham for the kiddy number.

I eschewed the trip to my favourite wog deli for double smoked ham sliced into paper thin morsels, and instead decided (due to time constraints) to simply buy it from the deli located within our local supermarket.

God, was that foolish. I requested 10 slices of the double smoked stuff, which is about double what I need for a pizza, but I like to scoff it on its own as I make the pizza, so I always need extra. It's that tasty, it is hard to resist.

Stupidly, I didn't watch the deli-chick making up my order - I was browsing through an enormous basked of cheese trying to find an acceptable wedge of parmesan. It wasn't until I got home that I discovered that instead of 10 super thin slices - slices so thin that you can almost see through them - slices so thin that if you hold them up by one edge, they tear under their own weight - I had in fact purchased 10 slabs of ham, each about the thickness of a fence post. Even I, a totally hamfisted slicer of ham, could have shaved it more thinly than that. The slabs could have doubled as tarpaulins for patching holes in the roof next time a storm comes through and rips off a few tiles. You could take that ham on an outback roadtrip and use it to plug tyre punctures. It was almost solid enough to use as a frisbee, and if you played dog-fetch frisbee, it was so tough, your average dog would catch the frisbee about 100 times before putting a dent in the ham with his teeth.

I guess the biggest single difference between the people that work in a supermarket deli and those that work in a family deli are that for the supermarket folk, the deli is just a position that you work in. You might be on checkout one day, packing shelves the next and serving ham the day after. It's a low paid job that pays your way through Uni.

A family run deli on the other hand is presumably full of people that are selling food because they like that food. I would hope that the wogs flogging expensive olive oil at my local wogarama have tasted all the oils on the shelf and probably only stocked them after a taste test - not because some buyer in a distant head office decide to stock brands A, B and C because they were cheap.

Hence my totally crap ham.